


The Lion Lies Down with the Lamb

by iberiandoctor (jehane18)



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Bible, Daddy Issues, Golems, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Porn Battle, Pre-Episode: s02e13 Mizumono, Prompt Fill, Revelations, Season/Series 02, Snuff, eschatology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-28
Updated: 2016-03-28
Packaged: 2018-05-29 15:23:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6381811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jehane18/pseuds/iberiandoctor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pre-Mizumono, Will imagines the Day of Judgment, and what comes after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Lion Lies Down with the Lamb

**Author's Note:**

  * For [raedbard](https://archiveofourown.org/users/raedbard/gifts).



> Beta and title by the fabulous [Underground](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Underground), A/B/O reader of my heart. Without her this story would never have seen the light of day. Remaining errors, purpleness, etc, remain my sole responsibility.

In the last days of their end game, the walls of the elaborate trap closing in on all sides of them, when Will considers what must soon take place, he sometimes lets himself think about whether the outcome could be altered. He lets himself consider what might occur if, rather than taking those final, fatal steps towards destruction, Jack and Hannibal sought another path – marked not by war but by something that might turn aside their bloody destiny, a path where these two men might not forsake the love they once had, but instead embraced it.

But Will knows that hope is as false as his own false heart. He knows that even the act of love between these two adversaries would be like any other battle.

If he lets the golden pendulum sweep across his mind's eye, he can watch them grapple together like giants: with foreheads of bronze and eyes like blazing stars, looking for an opening under the other's guard, large fists lashing out lightning-fast and taking hold. They would make sounds like peals of thunder, they would writhe and wrestle the other and clutch at each other in a brutal dance, and coming out of their mouths would be smoke and sulphur and tongues like sharp double-edged swords. Silver sweat would limn their bare muscles like that of angels, and bright blood would paint their features unrecognizable in red, and the earth would shake with their passage.

Eventually one would gain the upper hand, choking until the other had to breathe and could not. One would have to concede, powerful body finally going limp, exposing the soft line of his throat to the other in surrender. 

Will can pretend that the two adversaries are equally matched, that the outcome is uncertain, but his cold mind’s eye knows that it is not. It knows that on all battlefields, on all the paths that lead to war or to sex, it would be Jack who surrendered first.

It would be Jack who surrendered first, and Hannibal would hold him down and fuck him into the antique hand-knotted Persian carpet in Hannibal’s hallway, and as Jack was coming, groaning with his own mortality, Hannibal would rip his throat out with his teeth and leave him to bleed out.

Will never watches beyond that.

Jack is trying to lay the traps such that if anyone has to surrender in the coming battle, it will not be _him_. He knows he can’t fight Hannibal by himself, knows he needs to marshal all his armies, all the powers of this world, in order to survive the final encounter with Hannibal Lecter. 

Jack is a man of science, but as a leader he sees the grand design, he knows the words of prophecy and takes to heart what is written there. He carries with him the rarefied dignity of the eternal, wears the sign of his faith on a thin chain around his neck. In the mornings when he first sets foot in his office, he casts aside his laptop and cell phone and all other devices to read from the gilt-edged book that rests at the edge of his desk, the leather cracked and faded with long use. 

When they first came together, when they started to lay the first of the many-woven threads of the trap that would lure Hannibal from his lair, it was Will who offered himself up as the trap’s irresistible hook. He would head out into endless night, refusing to wear a wire, and return to Jack the next day for a full debrief, reporting on the sights and sounds from the monster’s den and the acts that he had, himself, been forced to commit, that he’d delighted in committing. 

After the first time, Jack began to read to Will in the mornings, turning the pages carefully in his big hands as if they were made from filigree.

As their plans took shape and were eventually put in motion, Jack read to Will from the books of the wild-eyed prophets that spoke with tongues of flame of things to come, from the records of the Christ's devoted apostles who bore witness to the ultimate sacrifice of the Lamb, of God made flesh, the blood that was spilled to purchase the world from the Devil and all his works.

And he read to Will from the revelation of the end of days as given to John the Beloved, on the island of Patmos. 

One verse stays with Will:

_"They called to the mountains and the rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can withstand it?"_

Will thinks about that verse today in bed in the FBI safe house. It's the end of the line of their long con with Hannibal, the end of his world, where they will finally turn the key to the shaft of the abyss and let the smoke and fire rise from it like a giant furnace. The great day of wrath approaches, and with it, the day of judgment: where the temple in Heaven will open and the ark of the covenant would be seen within, and all those who would destroy the earth would be themselves destroyed. 

And thereafter, as John would have it, there would be a new heaven and a new earth, where the old order of things has passed away, where there will be no more death or mourning, where the lion will lie down with the lamb, and … and the whole kingdom will become as new. 

Will is under no illusions as to what his designated role in the prophecy might be. It almost amuses him. Soft-eyed without his glasses, he cloaks himself with a guardedness that does not speak of angels with flashing swords or giants that carry stars in their hands. He knows his slighter frame would lend itself to easy, beautifully filleting through his breast bone; to being spread out like largesse for birds of prey. But appearances are deceptive, and roles can be reversed in a heartbeat like images in carnival mirrors, and he knows only too well the silver flash of the monster lying quiescent beneath the filleted, flayed skin of the lamb. 

He knows only too well how Hannibal sees him, how Hannibal wants to see him make himself into a new creation, the old creature slipping away and the new stepping into the light, clear-eyed and baptised in blood. How Hannibal sees him, now, on the threshold of this last flight, as an imago in the final stage of his maturation - on the cusp of transformation into the monster that is and isn't his own design. Hannibal wants to help it take wing, and would suggest that can only be a blessing. 

Instead, Jack is trying to make him face the day of judgment as a man, as _his_ man.

Jack sits on the edge of the bed. Bare, backlit by the cold morning, he looks like granite given life, an implacable rock on which Will has staked his freedom. He looks as if he has never needed the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the light he carried with him has always been enough.

He’s running through the schedule for that evening, the choreography of their endgame. He’s done that from the beginning: it started with the two of them setting out to trap the leviathan like fishermen out in deep sea, and that is how Jack intends it to end.

"I'll be wearing a wire, and a vest. I’ll have men on rooftops of neighboring houses. Sight lines to all windows.”

He lowers his brows, looks levelly at Will. “He won't escape us, I promise you." 

They've been over this before. "The kitchen is where he'll try to kill you," says Will. He tries for a smile. “More convenient for the _gyusashi_. Or, if you’re not up for eating it that raw, he’ll make _tataki_ instead.”

Jack doesn’t appreciate the gallows humor, or maybe he doesn’t like the evidence of Hannibal’s influence on Will’s culinary tastes. Will wishes he has something better to offer.

He also knows that if Hannibal succeeds in the kitchen, he'll feast on Jack slowly in the dining room, which holds the charges and spinning atoms of all those dinners, all the truths and deceptions the three of them had ever shared as they broke bread together.

He wonders, with weary amusement, when Hannibal would plan to kill Will – before the first course? Or would he ask Will to partake of the sacrifice? Will is suddenly too afraid of what his mind’s eye might see.

Jack says: "Don’t worry. The SWAT team will be on the ground for immediate access to the kitchen, dining room and front door. Plus, access to you. Are you still refusing to wear a vest?"

Will says, "He's not going to shoot either one of us, Jack. He'll cut us," and Jack has no easy response to this. 

Instead, they come together as they often do in these end times, sinking into the depths of this borrowed bed, those past and present moments etched in amber in Will's mind without the need for the pendulum's transition. Jack has always tried to give him strength: he runs his fingers through Will's hair and rubs warmth into Will's cold limbs, coaxes his cock to pulsing life. He breathes against Will's skin as if he's worthy, a holy sacrifice that would overthrow the great beast, which would, out of the chaos of the world, purchase this new beginning for them all. 

Will tries, too; he draws the tension out of Jack's leonine shoulders with his hands and tongue, he welcomes Jack into his mouth and drinks him down like a sacrament. He fights sleep and dreams to hold onto Jack at night, as if he’s the child Jack doesn’t have, as if his arms alone can shield Jack from judgment, from the destruction of everything they knew. When morning comes, bright and clean like linen, he can almost convince himself that if his strength did fail, he would make any sacrifice, would make _himself_ into any sacrifice, to keep Jack safe.

Will knows that in these last days, underneath the indomitable strength, despite any comfort that Will can lend him, Jack is fraying. Bella is dying, and Jack is unraveling with her in slow spools of light. Deep down, Will knows that sense of fraying, too, an unraveling into darkness within himself, when he considers that Hannibal may die as well. When he considers how it will come down to either Hannibal, or Jack, at the last, who both believe him to be their man in the room, who believe him to be _their_ man.

After they finish, Jack withdraws from Will’s embrace. He doesn’t let Will hold him for too long this time. He showers quickly and then paces the room listening to his earpiece as he gets dressed for work. Will watches him pull up his pressed trousers, watches him button his shirt over his broad chest and slide his cufflinks into place. 

Does Jack ever imagine Will and Hannibal having sex? Perhaps he does; it might help him try to divine the threads of the grander design, to help him plan for disaster, if he were to steel himself to peer more closely into that particular abyss, to consider the possibility of Will veering towards the darkness rather than the light. 

And so: maybe Jack imagines them approaching each other as equals, laying aside their weapons and vast armies and resources, to taste and touch each other, slowly, with great and terrible care, with the grunts and poetry of life. Neither gives battle, neither surrenders nor tears apart with teeth and fang and two-edged sword. In Hannibal's bed, in each other's arms, what they seek isn't dominance or victory or even raw pleasure, but to know each other, to see each other, to see _themselves_ in each other, the rarest of gifts.

A wiser man might be fearful of coming so close to the great beast in his lair, of seeking out an embrace that held the terrifying promise of violence. Jack might be fearful, for Will. But Will himself is surprisingly free from fear. 

It's not that he sees his monster as being a match for Hannibal's. It’s not, in the same way that Jack’s is not. It's because he knows – and it moves him beyond measure – that Hannibal would restrain himself, would hold himself back: for Will, for no one except his Will.

Jack wants the day of judgment to come, he wants the reckoning of justice to take hold of Hannibal. To see him behind bars if he can; the great beast flung from the heavens and bound with chains to the earth. To see him in the ground if he can't. 

And even if Jack doesn't admit this to himself, he also wants to see who Will has become over the course of this long game, to see to whom it is that Will belongs. To know the truth about this man who might lie down with the beast and not be devoured whole.

“See you later,” Jack says, when he’s done with his call. He reaches over and touches Will’s hand briefly. A light touch, but Will has to close his eyes for a moment. 

When he opens them, Jack is gone. He needs to stop by the hospital on the way to work.

Will would like to believe he’s Jack’s man, in the end. He’d like to believe that, in the day of judgment, Jack will succeed, that light would triumph over darkness and the voice from the temple would cry, “It is done!” And after that, perhaps there would be a path for him and Jack to walk together, in the quiet morning of their new world, to find some measure of ease from the loss of Bella, the loss of Hannibal.

He’d like to believe that, because he’s afraid he has already become Hannibal’s monster: that once the great beast had let him see him, crowned in many crowns, once he had looked into the many-eyed darkness of the abyss that was a mirror into himself, he was from that day forward transformed forever: from the Lamb to Judas Iscariot, and from Judas to the second beast of the prophecy that came after the first – the second beast, who had two horns like a lamb, but who spoke like a dragon; whose breath healed the wounds of the first beast in the same way as his breath would give Hannibal new life.

He’s afraid because all his mind’s eye can see is the inevitability of Hannibal’s victory: the slow, sickening replay of the battle royale, a shuddering clash of behemoths in quarter time, operatic music rising around them, large hands reaching to do violence or reaching to a love that is indistinguishable from violence. A replay that ends with Jack bleeding out on Hannibal’s floor, crushed and voiceless like the shell of a golem after the battle, after the passage of love. 

When the great day of wrath approaches, when judgment is upon them, when the moment comes, can Will do what must be done? Time is running out for him, for them, for all of them – alone in the FBI's borrowed bed, his lover having left his side, his not-lover ever-present by his side – he needs to be sure that he can.  


**Author's Note:**

> For raedbard’s PBAM 2016 prompt: _Hannibal (TV), Jack Crawford/Will Graham, eschatology, golem, filigree_. There isn’t enough Jack/Will (or Jack/Hannibal!) in the world, and this prompt was so irresistible that I was compelled make some. Dialogue fragments from Season Two, Episode 13's "Mizumono", text fragments from the Book of Revelations (NIV), including Will's reference to the "second beast" at Rev 13:11.


End file.
